General Response

Today I received a response from the constituency e-mail addressof Ontario Health Minister Deborah Matthews. The message sender was not Ms. Matthews, but from one of her helpers. She told me that my message would be forwarded on to Ms. Matthews’ Queen’s park address and that I could always send my inquiry to the Ministry’s general address. I forwarded this message on to Christina’s Mom so she was aware of what I had heard so far and was told she had not gotten any word from the letters she had sent.

Well, this afternoon we both received identical messages from a man named Glenn Oldford, who I guess is in charge of sending general e-mails from some closet within the Ministry called Correspondence Services – our tax dollars hard at work!! I have copied the message below, not because it tells us anything, but because I think it’s important for the world to see how the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care spends our money and responds to a plea for life saving assistance.

Dear Ms. Sillaby:

Thank you for your e-mail message regarding a child’s care at the Hospital for Sick Children. While I cannot comment on the care of a third party, I would like to provide you with some information about hospital funding and operations.

The Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care plays a strategic role in health care, but it does not intervene in the care of individual patients. This involves medical decisions that are best addressed by clinical teams.

The number of procedures that a particular hospital performs reflects the hospital’s decisions about budgetary and operational issues, such as the purchase of prosthetic implants and how to allocate operating room time.

Although the ministry provides funding for hospitals through Local Health Integration Networks, hospitals are independent corporations run by their own boards of directors. Each hospital receives a set funding allocation, and the hospital’s administration decides how to use this funding to best suit the needs of the community it serves. This is set out under the provisions of the Public Hospitals Act and other legislation. The hospital boards are directly responsible for the day-to-day management of their hospitals, including the quality of care provided to their patients.

The hospital administration is best able to provide feedback about a patient’s treatment and its own operations.

Thank you Mr. Oldford. I can see you put a lot of thought into your response and am so glad my tax dollars are being put towards the employment of such a useless position. I’m pretty sure my dog could have come up with a more creative way of saying “the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care is a waste of tax payers money and we don’t care about critically ill children because we just hand out your money and leave it’ up to others to spend it.”

I think I will continue sending e-mails and letters each week on Christina’s behalf because there’s gotta be someone who actually cares out there…